MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Spring 2020

51 If you’re not familiar with the expression “dirt time”, it’s used as in: “My tracking skills are slipping, I haven’t been getting much dirt time.” For one epic season, I got a lot of dirt time: For minimum wage I worked a backcountry maintenance position in Killarney Provincial Park. I was the one who dug the thunderboxes (the trick is to move the box off the old hole and use the dirt from the new hole to bury what you try not to see when you’re swatting bugs off your kid in the rain at 2 a.m.). We cleared trails and cleaned campsites, packed out trash and burned down an outhouse, but not before we paddled it out with another crew in a “crapper canoe-catamaran” to where it met its fiery end. I was the sweaty guy packing a chainsaw in Park overalls, steel-toed boots, and a blood- and deerfly-stained shirt from battles won and lost. We worked in crews of two, ten days on, four days off, with a week of vacation in the middle of the season. We used our own gear, packed our own food and fended for ourselves. When I ripped the seam around the door of my tent diving in to escape the voracious bugs, it was my own dental floss that saved the day. I also learned you can remodel a canoe’s yoke with a lifejacket belt and parachute cord. We traded off making dinner, I made my backcountry sushi chef debut, but otherwise—because we could keep what food allowance we didn’t spend—dirt time was powered on a dirtbag diet. Lunch consisted of pepperette-and-cheese wraps and evenings closed with a ration off the kilo bar of chocolate. We accepted cookies from campers, used abandoned table syrup, ate Ontario Rangers’ leftovers or scavenged freeze-dried meals jettisoned by weary hikers. You’d be amazed how easily you can clothe, feed and clean yourself from the trailside. It was a simple equation of maximum dirtbag strategies to maximize dirt time. It also meant 27 days of straight camping with no showers but the ones in waterfalls. So what makes dirt time valuable? You get to see a toad swimming, a bumblebee pollinating a parasitic plant that lacks chlorophyll ( Monotropa uniflora , look it up!), a pine tree with a looped trunk, otters living in a beaver lodge, and a mother moose with her twins. You get to be woken up by snapping turtles fighting and have a beaver stalk your campsite. You get to swim with the snappers (I had a point to prove) and see a mother loon flattening herself out on her nest. You get to see the day end and begin again from atop Silver Peak and bear witness to not only light pollution and the size of Sudbury’s superstack, but how little of the bigger whole is set aside for protection—making the work of groups like Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve and Georgian Bay Land Trust absolutely crucial. –Tom Thwaits Dirt Time: Killarney Backcountry Maintenance TOP Warden Pauline on a Killarney backcountry maintenance mandated break. BOTTOM Swimming with snappers. TOM THWAITS